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Rowdy Brats or a Lawsuit Waiting to Happen?

Every new school
year, students buy new clothes, organize their school supplies, and get ready
for… hostile work environments? That’s
right. If you aren’t careful, your
little tykes (or teens) could be the source of legal liability in the
classroom. Now proving student-on-teacher
hostile work environment claims is quite difficult, and of course, kids are
expected to be kids. But if you’re a
principal concerned about some misbehaving kids or a school board dealing with
complaints from teachers about this issue, here are some helpful pointers:

Can Teachers Really
Win This Kind Of Lawsuit?

Sure, but not as a matter of law. These cases are rare but have seen a slow
uptick in the last two decades. They
will typically show up when the school is moving for summary judgment on a
teacher’s hostile work environment claim.
The best case scenario for the teacher at that stage of the case is to
get that claim to trial. To date, there
is no known record of a teacher actually winning such a case on summary
judgment.

What Makes This Kind
Of Case Different?

Unlike with traditional Title VII cases, where an employee
sues his or her employer for conduct that the employer is directly responsible
for, students aren’t employees nor are they acting on behalf of the
school. Therefore, the school isn’t
vicariously liable for their actions. Courts
that have allowed such lawsuits to proceed generally do so on the theory that
school administrators are in a greater position of authority to “manage” their
students and have a responsibility to teachers to exercise that authority. This rationale grew out of Davis v. Monroe Cnty. Bd. of Educ., 526
U.S. 629, 119 S.Ct. 1661, 143 L.Ed.2d 839 (1999), a Supreme Court case
dealing with a school district’s responsibility for student-on-student
harassment.

Split Results?

As
this area of the law develops, the cases appear to be a bit unpredictable. For example, in Eyo v. Orangeburg Consol. Sch. Dist. 5, 2015 BL 85946, 8 (D.S.C. Mar. 27, 2015), a 71-year-old black female teacher who was born
in Nigeria could go forward on her hostile work environment claim against the
school district after her students physically assaulted her and repeatedly
threw things at her. But in Deen v. Shenandoah Cty. Pub. Sch., 2017 BL 240713, 5 (W.D. Va. July 12, 2017), a black teacher with a
Muslim-sounding name couldn’t go forward on his hostile work environment claim
even after alleging that a student at one school called him a “n****r” and
threatened to “kick his a**” and that students at another
school taunted him with racially charged questions like whether he liked fried
chicken. The court considered those
incidents to be isolated and concluded that, even taken together, they didn’t
establish a hostile work environment.

Is There
A Test?

Yes (and no school pun
intended), a New York federal court has taken a crack at establishing the
elements of a hostile work environment claim based on student-on-teacher
harassment. The court explained that first, a plaintiff must show “that a hostile
environment existed and second that the school board either provided no
reasonable avenue of complaint or knew of the harassment and failed to take
appropriate remedial action.” Berger-Rothberg
v. City of New York, 803 F.Supp.2d 155, 165, 2011 BL 75962, 8 (E.D.N.Y. 2011). Second,
the plaintiff must point to evidence so “that a jury could reasonably find that
school officials failed to take appropriate remedial action.”

This test might produce divergent results, but it sure
would be a good idea to keep that test handy if your students are a little
rowdy coming back from summer break.

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